23andMe

Two friends who worked alongside each other at a Connecticut restaurant made a remarkable discovery: DNA testing revealed they are biological sisters

Julia Tinetti and Cassandra Madison always joked that they were sisters, but had no clue they shared a biological family in the Dominican Republic.

23andMe, a genetic testing start-up that pioneered personalized medicine as a consumer business, trades under ticker “ME” in a deal with Richard Branson’s SPAC.

Home DNA-testing company 23andMe laid off 100 employees this week due to declining sales.

Two families with lifelong secrets unearthed because of home DNA test kits are now dealing with the truth. Here’s what their stories tell us about the shock that can come from new ancestry technology, and how to deal with it.

Word of the arrest — via a friend’s text message — hit Wayne Sankey like a thunderbolt. “I said, ‘You gotta be kidding me,'” Sankey recalled. “And then I told the wife and she couldn’t believe it. ‘There’s no way,’ she said. ‘Ray down the road?'” Ray Vannieuwenhoven was his next-door neighbor — a helpful, 82-year-old handyman with a gravelly...

A newborn baby was found dead in a ditch in South Dakota, but the case went cold. Then a detective picked up the case again 28 years after the crime, NBC News reports. “This case felt solvable, it always felt like we were so close,” retired Sioux Falls Detective Michael Webb told NBC News. 10 years after Webb began working...

Millions of people have done it and you may be one of them – sent off a saliva sample to figure out your DNA ancestry. But one Massachusetts man is questioning how accurate these tests really are after getting different results from two genetics companies. Paul Genest, of Swampscott, knows a lot about his family history, and he considers himself...

Under federal law, companies are not allowed to use your genetic information against you for things like health insurance or a job. But that protection does not apply to things like life insurance or long-term care insurance, and the laws are constantly changing.

With the popularity of companies like 23andMe, AncestryDNA and My Heritage DNA, forensic genealogy has become a powerful tool in fighting crime. News4’s Doreen Gentzler reports.

23andMe, which provides DNA testing kits for consumers, is telling outside app developers that they’ll no longer have access to the company’s raw genomic data. Developers of health apps, weight loss services and quantified self tests have been able to use 23andMe’s anonymized data sets since 2012, when the company announced the opening of its application programming interface (API). The...

Three DNA companies have announced they will donate DNA kits to help reunite immigrant children with their parents, as the Trump administration moves to end a policy of splitting up families at the U.S.-Mexico border. MyHeritage said in a news release that it aims to provide 5,000 free DNA tests for interested parents and children who were separated. 23andMe CEO...

After repeatedly calling on Congress to solve the immigration problem, President Donald Trump now wants lawmakers to delay immigration reform until after the midterm elections in November.

Investigators hunting for the so-called Golden State Killer turned to searching genetic websites in 2017 but misidentified an Oregon man as a potential suspect. A year later, after using a similar technique, they are confident they’ve caught the serial rapist and killer who eluded capture for four decades. In March 2017, an Oregon City police officer, working at the request...

The use of a genealogy website to track down a suspected California serial killer illustrates both the extraordinary power of DNA-sharing services and the broad privacy concerns that surround the fast-growing commercial market for genetic analysis. TV commercials for companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com pitch their services as simple and fun ways of learning about family heritage and health....

Tracy Thomas was just 12-years-old in the August of 1976 when she saw a man try to take off the screen of her bedroom window.

Joseph James DeAngelo, who authorities suspect is the so-called Golden State Killer responsible for at least a dozen murders and 50 rapes in the 1970s and 80s, was arrested more than three decades after the last killing with the help of information from an online genealogical site. Investigators haven’t disclosed many key elements about why they took this very unusual...

Matt White remembers that day in September 2016 when a mystery began to unravel that would change his life. It started when White read a news report that Dr. Donald Cline, a retired Indianapolis fertility specialist, faced charges for lying when he denied he’d inseminated unwitting patients with his sperm decades ago. He checked Cline’s address; it was the location...

As at-home DNA tests become more convenient and common, users are dealing with more questions about their origins and the emotional aftermath of their results, CNBC reported. DNA tests sites such as AncesteryDNA and 23andMe expect more people than ever to have the DNA tests during the holidays. Millions have already gotten tested. And for many of these people, the...

At-home DNA tests that reveal your family history and ancestral roots are gaining popularity before the holiday season, but how accurate are they? Identical triplet sisters appeared on the “Today” show to test three brands. Californian sisters Kaeli, Kelsey and Korrie tested kits from the popular companies AncestryDNA, 23andMe and MyHeritage DNA. Because the sisters’ DNA is identical, the tests...